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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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from the book

Matthew Zapruder was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C. He received a BA from Amherst College, an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Zapruder’s first book, American Linden, was published by Tupelo Press in 2002 after winning the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. He is also the author of the poetry collections Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), and Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). His honors include the May Sarton poetry award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

About Zapruder’s poems, Tony Hoagland has said, "Zapruder has not just a deft manner, but an inwardness which is sturdy and generous, a little reminiscent of the James Wright of quite a different era."

With Joshua Beckman, Zapruder coedits Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga.

Poem for Jack Spicer

It's the start of baseball season,
and I am thinking again
as I do every year
in early April now
that I live in California
where afternoon is a blue
span to languidly cross
of those long ones
you used to sort of sleep
through getting drunk
on many beers, lying
next to your radio
on a little square of grass
in the sun, listening
half to the game and half
to the Pacific water gently
slapping the concrete
barrier of the man-made cove.
I have heard it and it sounds
like conversations among
not there people I can't
quite hear. But you could.
And later you would try
to remember what they said
and transcribe it on your
black typewriter
in your sad, horrible room.
When I read your poems
about suicide and psychoanalysis
I feel very lucky and ashamed
to be alive at all. Everyone
has been talking lately
about radiation, iodine,
and wind, and you are in
your grave, far from the water.
I know I don't care about you
at all but when I look
at your photograph,
your round head tilted up
so you are staring down
at everyone, I remember
how much you hated your body.
Today I will go down by the water
where you used to sit and think
I do not hate my body
even though I often do.
When I die please write he tried
on whatever stone you choose.

Matthew Zapruder

by this poet

Hello beautiful talenteddark semi-optimists of June,from far off I send my hopesBrooklyn is sunny, and the ghostof Whitman who loved everyoneis there to see you say whatcan never be said, something likepartly I promise my whole lifeto try to

I like to be alone in someone else’s house,practicing my cosmic long distance wink.I send it out toward a mirrorsome distracted bored cosmonaut droppedon an asteroid hurtling vastlycloser to our star. No one watchesme watching thousandsof television hours, knittinga

In Milwaukee it is snowing
on the golden statue
of the 1970s television star
whose television house
was in Milwaukee
and also on the Comet Cafe
and on the white museum
the famous Spanish architect
built with a glass
elevator through it
and a room with a button
that when you press it
makes two

related poems

"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone